For anyone with an interest in the history of clothing, dress, textiles, lace and embroidery, paricularly of the early modern period, 1550-1750

Monday, 29 September 2014

Smock Shift Chemise

Figure 1: Engraving of a portrait of Nell Gwyn

I am fascinated by words and their origins. There are three
words that describe what was the main women’s undergarment for over a thousand
years – the smock, the chemise and the shift. Smock and chemise are part of
that wonderful dichotomy that enriches the English language, and means that we
have cattle and sheep in the field, but beef and mutton on the table. Smock is
Old English, while chemise comes from the Latin and the French, and both terms
appear to have been in use in the early middle ages – let’s say around the time
of the Norman Conquest, so in different sections of Morris’s work on 12th
century texts you have references to both, “Hire chemise smal and hwit” and
“hire smoc hwit”. (1)There being fashions in language, just as
there are fashions in clothes, chemise more or less disappears in the middle
ages.

By the middle of the 17th century people are still speaking
of their smocks, but this is being replaced by that upstart word shift. Now
shift comes from the idea of movement in the original use of the word, and by
the late 16th, early 17th century people were using it in the way that we
nowadays would speak of a change of clothes, so that for example of someone
getting soaked on board ship it is said “He that had five or six shifts of
apparel had scarce one dried thread to his back”(2) A hundred years
later the shift has become a woman’s undergarment. By this time shift had also
taken on the meaning of the women’s changing room in Restoration theatres.
Pepys writes of visiting the theatre where the actress Elizabeth Knepp took him
“up into the tireing-rooms: and to the women’s shift, where Nell [Gwyn] was
dressing herself”.(3) A print of Lely’s
painting of Nell in a smock/shift is at Fig 1.

By the late 17th
century the term shift was in common use, with the 1696 work “The Merchant’s
Wharehouse laid Open; or The Plain Dealing Linnen-Draper” declaring yard wide
holland to be “the bredth for shifts for a moderate-size body, but for a Lusty
woman it is too narrow.” In 1712 Addison used the word shift in his example of
the rags make paper circle, writing, “The finest pieces of Holland [a cloth
often used for shifts], when torn to tatters, assume a whiteness more beautiful
than their first, and often return in the shape of letters to their native
country. A lady’s shift may be metamorphosed into a billet-doux, and come into
her possession a second time. ” (4) The smock continued in occasional use, the London Tradesman in 1747 is
quoted as saying that holland, cambric and other fine fabric is provided to be
made into, “smocks, aprons, tippets, hankerchiefs...”(5)

Moving into the late 18th century early 19th century, chemise
makes its reappearance as a term, with the fashion for the chemise gown. In the
1780s the fashion for the chemise gown is definitely for an outer garment. The
Ipswich Journal of April 1786 describes, “The chemise has two collars and is
made of a pale lilac India lutestring (a type of taffeta)...the breast knot
with which the chemise is tied and the shoes are of the same colour.”(6)

By the middle of the
19th century it was referring to an undergarment. In his 1850
autobiography Leigh Hunt writes that shift, “that harmless expression has been
set aside in favour of the French word chemise.”(7) As with the
smock/shift change over the divisions are not that hard and fast. The word
smock is still around, in the Ingoldsby Legends published in the 1840s someone
is described as saying, “You may sell my chemise, (Mrs. P. was too well—bred to
mention her smock)”

1. Morris, Richard.Old English homilies of
the twelfth century · EETS 53, 1873. London : Early English Texts
Society, 1873.

2. Beste, George.A true discourse of the late voyages of discouerie... London :
Henry Bynnyman, 1578.

1 comment:

I wanted to let you know that I've found your blog post plagiarized on Bras Blog - http://www.brasblog.info/article/4386159104/smock-shift-chemise/. (They did the same thing to me.) You might want to ask them to take it down.